Strong adjectival forms in Early Middle English: a syntactic and FSP perspective

The Master's thesis proceeds from a corpus-based analysis and focuses on strong forms of Early Middle English adjectives. A formal distinction between weak and strong adjectival forms had disappeared during the period of Middle English, the work, therefore, aims at the transitional period between Old and Middle English, when the strong forms could still be identified, either due to the relics of inflectional endings, syntactic position, or context. A representative sample of the most frequent adjectives was chosen from the corpus comprising the extant Middle English texts with help of specific searching code. Consequently, the strong forms were manually chosen from these according to their formal characteristics and position in the sentence. This sample was then analyzed from the syntactic point of view, as well as from the point of view of functional sentence perspective. The results of the analysis show that the indication of indefiniteness was mostly expressed by the mix of syntactic and contextual means in EME. It has also been found out that the adjectives, being used both attributively and predicatively, were by rule part of the rheme